Stalin's Library: A Dictator and His Books

Stalin returned to the theme of the Red Army as a contemporary army in a speech to 2,000 graduates of its staff academies on 5 May 1941. But this time Stalin stated that the Red Army had been transformed into a contemporary army – a mechanised and well-equipped army with the requisite amount of artillery, armour and air power. He also probed the reasons for Germany’s victory over France in summer 1940, arguing the Germans had reconstructed their armed forces and had avoided fighting a war on two fronts. The Germans had been victorious because they fought to liberate their country from the shackles of the Versailles Peace Treaty imposed on Germany by Britain and France in 1919. That success would falter if they transitioned to wars of conquest, which is what happened to Napoleon when he stopped fighting wars of liberation. Many people believed the German army was invincible, said Stalin. It wasn’t. There never was and never could be such an army.²⁷⁴

At the accompanying reception he proposed several toasts, including one recorded by Comintern leader Georgi Dimitrov: ‘Our policy of peace and security is at the same time a policy of preparation for war. There is no defence without offence. The army must be trained in a spirit of offensive action. We must prepare for war.’²⁷⁵

In his Red Army day order of February 1942, Stalin identified five ‘permanently operating factors’ that would determine the outcome of the war now that the advantage the Germans had gained from their surprise attack had passed: (1) stability of the rear; (2) morale of the army; (3) number and quality of divisions; (4) armaments; and (5) organisational ability of army leaders.²⁷⁶

Estimating the relative significance of the Red Army’s victory at Stalingrad and the great Soviet–German armoured clash at Kursk, Stalin reflected in November 1943 that ‘while the battle of Stalingrad heralded the decline of the German-Fascist army’, he said, ‘The battle of Kursk confronted it with disaster.’²⁷⁷

In the annals of Soviet history 1944 became known as the year of the ‘ten great victories’ and in his November 1944 speech Stalin gave a masterly display of the narrative technique of military history when he structured an account of that year’s events around a sequential series of battles and operations that pushed the Germans out of the USSR.²⁷⁸

He returned to the theme of the role of objective factors in war in his election speech to Moscow’s voters in February 1946:

It would be wrong to think that such a historical victory could have been achieved without preliminary preparation by the whole country for active defence. It would be no less wrong to assume that such preparation could have been made in a short space of time, in a matter of three or four years. It would be still more wrong to assert that our victory was entirely due to the bravery of our troops. Without bravery it is, of course, impossible to achieve victory. But bravery alone is not enough to overpower an enemy who possesses a vast army . . . it was necessary to have fully up-to-date armaments.²⁷⁹

And at a private meeting in April 1947 Stalin distinguished ‘military science’ from ‘military art’:

To understand military science means to understand not only how to conduct war i.e. military art, but also to know the economy of a country, its potential, its weak and strong sides, and also how it is developing. To know the material and human resources, both your own and those of the enemy. Only by knowing . . . military science is it possible to count on the achievement of victory in war. . . . The former leaders of fascist Germany did not understand military science and were unable to administer the economy of their country.²⁸⁰

Before the Second World War, Clausewitz had been a figure of high esteem in Soviet military discourse, principally because Lenin viewed him favourably. In 1923 Pravda published Lenin’s ‘Notebook on Clausewitz’, which was reprinted in a 1931 collection of Lenin’s writings owned by Stalin.²⁸¹

Then, in 1945, Voennaya Mysl’ (Military Thought) – a journal published by the People’s Commissariat of Defence – carried an article by a Colonel G. Meshcheryakov on ‘Clausewitz and German Military Ideology’. Stalin read the article, noting three points. First, that Clausewitz’s ‘reactionary ideas’ had been popularised in Germany after the Franco-Prussian war of 1870–71. Second, that Clausewitz had borrowed from Hegel his reactionary philosophical system as well as his dialectical method. In Clausewitz’s writings, Hegel’s concept of the absolute spirit, wrote Meshcheryakov, was transformed into that of absolute war. Third, Clausewitz favoured short, decisive wars because that was the only way that a small country like Prussia could win the total wars of the contemporary era.²⁸²